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Preferred Screen-Capping Utility

There was another thread sort of on the subject, but it basically ended with "I'm gonna go check out a few of these and get back to you", so yeah :p

Anyone have any good suggestions as to what screen-capping utility to use to record videos? I know fraps is the standard answer, but I was wondering if there are any alternative suggestions and the like. I would like to record a few gaming sessions at some point (if only because I see a distinct lack of people who are willing to just post gameplay without commentary) and am wondering what the best choices would be.

Thanks.

Oh, and Windows (7) if it matters, but I don't think that will be too much of an issue for some reason. So don't worry about listing all those wonderful utilities designed to record gaming sessions on Mac and Linux :p

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

As far as i know dxtory is quite common among letsplay folks and your typical youtube celebrities (TotalBiscuit, etc.) these days - Though it eats up 'a bit' more diskspace than fraps and isn't as userfriendly (which can be blamed on the fact that it has somewhat more extensive settings - depending on your taste that might be viewed as a plus).

The overall image quality should be about the same, but last time i checked fraps forced you to play at a capped framerate (as in: while you record at 30fps you have to play at 30fps), which isn't the case with dxtory - also fraps tends to have a greater overall impact on performance than dxtory, but that probably mostly depends on the system.

You don't have to have MSI hardware to use it - it captures faster (e.g. less FPS loss) and better quality than Fraps - the price is right too

I get the impression that stuff like dxtory is aimed at people who like to think they're paying for something amazing for their 'amazing' hardware but I've read a fair few stories from people who expected perfection and didn't entirely get that. Probably an expectation issue rather than anything else - capturing video will ALWAYS slow down your PC and if you want to cap hi-def stuff, you'll use massive amounts of space and you WILL get hiccups etc. etc. - no getting away from that.

Anyway - MSI Afterburner is the bomb for almost any routine videocapping you could ever need to do - it's overlays are also rather excellent.

my take - NONE.
The best method is to just capture with a card or USB3 capture peripheral. If you have a laptop with usb3 or an older PC with a free PCIe slot, invest in either a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle or a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, then let the other system capture your gaming footage. Sure they're not exactly cheap, but you get a great piece of kit that allows for capturing up to 1080i uncompressed HD with zero framerate drops. It's ideal for live streaming because of this, provided you use the right compression codec for web friendly bitrates.

I went this route because capturing emulators like Dolphin or PCSX2 was almost impossible for a "normal" PC (i.e not a core i7 3960x)

I've used Evolve for image capturing and found it to be fairly average (though my hardware is well below average). On the plus side though, its a pretty decent gaming overlay for communicating with people, and it'll let you capture videos as .mkv, which should save space.

I've used Evolve for image capturing and found it to be fairly average (though my hardware is well below average). On the plus side though, its a pretty decent gaming overlay for communicating with people, and it'll let you capture videos as .mkv, which should save space.

Note that any attempt to compress video 'on the fly' is going to melt most PCs (and thus hammer framerates and capture smoothness) - HDD space is usually more readily available than CPU time surely!?

I've never really needed to cap more than a few mins of footage - if you're planning on capping your entire gaming life (and some people do this) then the earlier suggestion of using another PC to do it seems pretty wise to me.

If overlays are your thing, there are at least 2 others which offer capping but there always seem to be limits on quality or speed which are not present (as far as I've discovered thusfar) with MSI Afterburner!?!?

It depends on what kind of compression you're talking about. Straight up xvid? Yeah that's going to cost. Do something simple like huffyuv though, that might be fine. It'll almost halve the data. You can further reduce the data need by capturing at 30 FPS. Now we're firmly in the realm of what is possible with even oldish harddrives.

Also I don't see how 8 bits is equivalent to 24 bits. Please enlighten me.

Xsplit is nice to stream to capture and has a good overlay system. If you have an i7 and enough bandwidth you can get some good quality while saving on HDD space. But the extra effort in saving locally, converting and uploading to youtube and the like to save the file will give a better product. Using a 2nd PC to capture will allow the most flexibility.

Just to reply to the technical and mathematical vomit above - I meant compressing to the level you'd store/save/upload and not just using a straightforward compression algorithm to ensure you don't melt or fill your HDD...

MSI Afterburner offers 3 compression options, MJPG (the default) RTV1 and 'uncompressed' - the default (which also chops the resolution in-half) still creates files in 100s of Mbs in just a few mins tho, so capturing hours of gaming will require a LOT of space.